BROADCASTS.com

Roughly 20 years ago, Neha Krishnamohan arrived as a college freshman on Duke University\u2019s Durham, N.C., campus, intent on pursuing a career that would someday grant her the agency to develop a product or therapy capable of solving a healthcare problem.

Having grown up among family members with different careers in the medical field, Krishnamohan had inherited a deep interest in medicine\u2014although she felt that her tendency to want to be more \u201chands-on\u201d might make engineering a more suitable field of study.

\u201cAs far as I was concerned, I was going to go to work for a Medtronic or a Pfizer, where I would come up with a great new product,\u201d reports Krishnamohan, who after enrolling in Duke\u2019s Pratt School of Engineering chose biomedical engineering as her major.

As Krishnamohan was ratcheting up her engineering studies, one of her professors made a lasting impression on her by enlivening their discussions with tales of past experiences as a Wall Street banker.

\u201cThe idea that the financial merits of a company really inform its decision-making and that you as a finance person are at the center of critical decisions that need to be made was intriguing, to say the least,\u201d recalls Krishnamohan, who along the way began thinking of investment banking as perhaps an alternative path along which to achieve her goal of developing a medical product.   

As her college years progressed and Krishnamohan applied to a number of investment bank internship programs, eventually she nabbed a spot at Goldman Sachs, which subsequently offered her a full-time position upon her graduation in 2008.  

\u201cThis was a tumultuous time to be starting a career in investment banking, but I think that it helped to lay a foundation for me with regard to the importance of being prepared for the worst,\u201d explains Krishnamohan, who would remain at Goldman Sachs for a period 13 years, 11 of which were spent inside the firm\u2019s healthcare investment banking group. Krishnamohan ended up being named a Goldman vice president in 2015, about midway into her lengthy tenure with the firm.

In this same year, while Krishnamohan was tasked with helping a Boston-based client to prepare for an IPO, a snowstorm prevented her manager and Goldman colleagues from attending the company\u2019s \u201cdrafting sessions,\u201d wherein the firm\u2019s management and lawyers would toil for many hours over a period of days to create its IPO documents.

As Krishnamohan remembers, \u201cI knew that the room was going to be looking to me for the right guidance, so I embraced this and found myself having a point of view, asking questions, guiding them through the story\u2014and I saw that people were listening. It was a remarkable 3 days.\u201d

\u201cLeadership doesn\u2019t have to have all the answers,\u201d she adds. \u201cYou have to listen and drive toward decisions that have conviction.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney